Culture
Usher's 'Confessions' Has Been Playing at Wedding Receptions This Whole Time
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
VICE published a list this week identifying three R&B songs that are regularly played at wedding receptions despite containing lyrical content that is, by any reasonable measure, a description of the crimes that end marriages rather than begin them.
The piece was written with the urgent, revelatory tone typically reserved for investigative journalism, as though the author had personally infiltrated a wedding in Scottsdale and returned with classified intelligence rather than a Spotify playlist and a hangover.
The three songs flagged were Usher's 'Confessions Part II,' R. Kelly's 'Bump N' Grind,' and Beyonce's 'Drunk in Love,' which the article describes as 'sonically romantic but contextually alarming.' This is a sentence that required a staff meeting to approve.
Usher's 'Confessions Part II,' the crown jewel of the list, is a song in which a man informs his partner, over a lush orchestral backdrop, that he has fathered a child with another woman. It has been the third song at approximately eleven thousand wedding receptions. The couples danced. The grandmothers nodded along. Nobody listened to the words.
'It's a beautiful song,' said Darnell Patterson, 34, a wedding DJ operating out of Decatur, Georgia, who asked that his real name be used so his clients could find him on Google. 'If you listen to it with your eyes closed, it's very romantic. I don't encourage people to open their eyes.'
R. Kelly's inclusion on the list is doing what music journalists call 'the easy work,' given that the man is currently incarcerated and his entire catalogue is essentially a legal exhibit. That his songs still appear on wedding playlists is less a failure of cultural taste than a failure of WiFi, because the DJ downloaded the playlist in 2009 and nobody has updated it since.
Beyonce's 'Drunk in Love' rounds out the list, which is the kind of decision that reveals more about the author than the song. The VICE piece describes it as 'chaotic and sexually aggressive,' which is true in the same way that a wedding itself is chaotic and sexually aggressive if you have ever attended one with an open bar and a photo booth.
A spokesperson for the wedding industry, which is not a real organization but absolutely should be, declined to comment. A real spokesperson for The Knot, the wedding planning platform, said the company 'encourages couples to choose music that resonates with their personal journey,' which is a sentence that means nothing and says everything.
The VICE article does not suggest replacement songs. It identifies the problem, points at it for 600 words, and then ends. This is also what happens at most weddings.
Patterson said he once played 'Confessions Part II' at a vow renewal ceremony. The couple had been married for twenty-two years. 'They really connected with it,' he said. 'I didn't ask any follow-up questions.'
The list has since been shared 14,000 times, primarily by people tagging their spouses with no caption, which is its own kind of confession.
The Scottsdale wedding, it turns out, was fine.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.vice.com/en/article/3-rb-songs-that-get-played-at-weddings-but-definitely-shouldnt/